


Substitute

by acacia59



Category: The Who
Genre: M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 04:52:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/807467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acacia59/pseuds/acacia59
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I’m a substitute for another guy…the simple things you see are all complicated…It's a genuine problem, you won't try to work it out at all you just pass it by, pass it by.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Substitute

 

“You disgust me, you drunken lout,” he growls as he thrusts deeper into me, driving the edges of my hipbones into the rough concrete wall I am pressed against. I want to tell him to sod off, to tell him he is nothing but a sad junkie who is slowly chipping away at his genius with too much blow and too many cheap whores. But as my nails bite into the palms of my hands, my knuckles bloodied and raw against the cold stone, the words turn to dust in my throat, because in truth there is nothing he can call me that is worse than what I have already called myself.

I am angry and, as usual, my anger has me grasping at straws. I don’t know what it will fix, to be here in this godforsaken motel laundry room, fluorescent bulb flickering sickeningly above me, chair wedged hastily under the doorknob in a half hearted attempt at privacy, being fucked by a man who doesn’t want me, doesn’t even particularly like me. He pushes in harder and, unfeelingly, drives against that place deep inside me. I gasp as a bolt of pure sensation pierces through me, twisting like a cold snake in the pit of my stomach, more like nausea than anything approaching pleasure. I am hard and weeping, although I am not sure why. He barely touches me, fastidious, except of course for that most thorough and intimate of touches. The irony is not lost on me and I laugh, surprised by the unfamiliar rasp of my voice.

“What’s so bloody funny, Townshend?”

“Does it scratch an itch? Can you close your eyes and pretend for a moment that I am that other guy?”

“Fuck you,” he groans and then intertwines his fingers into my hair, wrenching my head back until my ear is pressed against his lips, the rush of his hot breath filling my head. “You could never be anything like him.”

“You are just using me.”

“And what do you think you are doing? Can’t quite work up the energy to give yourself a good flogging, better call in reinforcements.”

For a moment there is silence, punctuated by the harsh wheeze of labored breathing, the slap of sweat slicked flesh on flesh. It is the silence that is as important at the notes, I reflect suddenly, apropos of nothing, and I think of a brow knit in fierce concentration, a body held taut as a bowstring, fist in the air in boldly masculine defiance.

A wave of euphoria spirals through me and I feel my balls tightened and draw up. I grit my teeth hard enough to send shooting spasms through my jaw, unwilling and unworthy to play this game. I send the images from my mind and focus on the hand braced against the wall next to mine, a hand longer and more sinewy than the one I am trying to forget.

The hand moves and covers mine, roughly coaxing my balled fist to come undone. I shudder and try to shake him off, this caress sends a pulse of revulsion coursing through me like nothing else he has done. He pins my hand to the wall for a moment and I see his tendons jump under the pale white skin and then he releases me.

He digs his fingernails into my skin as he grabs my hips and thrusts forward again, violence that sends my breath from my body in a great ripping rush. I push back against him, needing this pain with a desperation that makes my eyes water and my heart race as he pulls out, agonizingly slow, only to fill me again with his cock in an onslaught of feeling.

“Coward,” he sneers.

“God…ah, don’t stop,” I sob.

“You wretched crack addict.” He emphasizes his words with a particularly vicious jab to my prostate and I keen some wordless babble as my release begins to build.

“You will never be loved,” his voice cracks, for a moment pure and high like it was when we were younger.

I come, shaking and sick, gasping out your name like a drowning man using his last breath to call for help. The man thrusting inside of me hears and starts to laugh, the mocking sound reverberates in my head like the vibrating cries of guitar feedback echoing from the amplifiers.

“Pathetic,” he snarls before picking up his pace. One, two, three driving plunges and he is coming too, silently, his teeth buried in my shoulder. We collapse together to the floor, a tangle of blood and sweat and aching flesh.

I look full into his eyes, insolently, daring him, daring myself to see the derision there. I need this, to be berated and punished, but his gaze is turned inward and I realize, the pit of my stomach falling away, that he hasn’t, this whole time, been talking to me.

***

I step out of my room, closing the door softly and rubbing my aching head. Pale, weak morning sunlight floods the hall through a small window at the end of the hall. I moan and swear to myself for the thousandth time that I will never again drink myself blind until I pass out on the floor.

A few rooms down the hall, a door slams with all the fury a slender brunette girl can manage. Her clothes are nice but rumpled, one stocking is torn from her ankle to her knee. She pushes her hair out of her face and sets her jaw. I think that she must be a force to be reckoned with and I instinctively shrink back against the wall as she heads towards me.  

Our eyes lock as she strides past. She gets a few feet past me, seems to change her mind and stops dead in her tracks.  She spins around and is abruptly right in my face, a slender, crimson-tipped finger waving under my nose.

“You tell that fucker if that’s all he wants, he should pay for his hookers next time,” she snarls and then she is gone, stalking down the hall with her head held high. I groan and pinch the bridge of my nose with one trembling hand. It is too early and I am too hung over for this.

I hear the soft click of a latch and I turn to find you leaning casually against the doorframe of your room, not a stitch of clothing on except a sheet wrapped carelessly around your hips. I find myself staring, mesmerized, at the pale skin visible in the vee of the overlapping ends of the sheet. My eyes track along the creases that lead from above your narrow hips to the edge of that tantalizing sheet and come to rest on the nearly delicate dusting of fair hair peeking out from underneath. You take a breath and your stomach moves, shifting the sheet down a tormenting inch. I swallow, hard, and then look up guiltily to see if you saw the direction of my gaze.

I needn’t have worried. You are still gazing after the brunette, a ghost of a smile playing across your lips. Then you look at me and shrug, “Women.” You stare past me again.  “Oh, but she was glorious.”

I look at you in surprise, remembering the girl’s fury as she spat her final words at me.

You seem unaffected. “They get too attached. A bloke won’t obsess about someone that way, eh?”

I twitch, but cover up my reaction by running my hands through my hair.

You smile that crooked grin that kills me every time and say, “Hey, how about we go grab some breakfast? That is unless you had plans?”

“No…I was just, I mean, you aren’t dressed…well,” I take a deep breath and begin again. “That is, I would love some breakfast, thanks.”

We wind up in a small diner a couple blocks from the hotel. You stand out like a sore thumb with your rock star hair, too tight jeans and Cuban heels, but you don’t seem to notice and I, once again, envy your easy arrogance. The sunlight streaming through the big plate glass windows catches the blue of your eyes and the honey wheat of your hair and makes it seem as if you are glowing with some inner fire. _And they call Robert fuckin’ Plant the golden god. Bullshit._

You catch the intensity of my gaze and to diffuse it I pull at the cuff of your blue mac where the hem is ripped out. “You can bloody well afford a new coat, yeah?”

You frown at your sleeve and my hand. “I like this one. It’s practically molded to me. I don’t know why you are always nagging at me, Pete…” you trail off as you notice the gauze wrapped around my knuckles.

“What did you do to your hand?” you ask, softly, and a roaring sound fills my head and I am not sure if I go instantly all white or just gape at you like a suffocating fish. I abuse my hands as much as it is humanly possible to do and still call one’s self a musician and yet it is those hurts you notice.

I try to get a hold of myself and succeed enough to reply, but not enough to think through that reply. “Can’t you mind your own business, you berk?”

I see the hurt in your face and mentally curse myself. _Why can’t I even sit together with him in a restaurant without ogling him or picking a stupid fight to cover up for all the ogling? I don’t even dare look him in the eye anymore._ I look down at the discolored Formica table top, picking out constellations in the flecked surface.

I hear you shift awkwardly and turn your head away. I sneak a glance up at you. You are staring absently out the window and I wonder for the thousandth time what goes on in that head of yours, what you think of me. As usual, I am left without a motherfucking clue.

A soft tendril of hair falls across your face and I reach out to tuck it back behind your ear without thinking. Instantly, you jerk away from my hand, wariness warring with confusion in your pale blue eyes. _Idiot,_ I berate myself, my skin crawling as I feel the depths of my sickness and perversion. _He will never want you._

***

I walk toward the living room, my footsteps echoing strangely in the dark residence. I have never seen this house so empty and an unsettled feeling creeps over me. I keep wanting to turn quickly and look over my shoulder to see if there is anyone or anything lurking in the shadows. A prickling sensation builds at the base of my neck and slowly crawls up my cheek.

You are sitting on the sofa as I slowly descend the short staircase, afraid to come too close. Your head is buried in your hands, a soft cascade of brown waves hides your expression from me.

“I am thinking about fucking selling it, John,” you say, desolately, seeming to sense my unease in the deathly still house.

“You can’t sell Tara, Keith.” I think of us on the lawn outside the warm and bright house, three years and a lifetime ago. You light a firecracker and throw it towards where Roger is standing with some suits. When it explodes right on cue, you fall with mad laughter right into my arms. I freeze as I do every time you so innocently touch me, rigid with desire and self loathing, and I look down into your face. Time crystallizes. The memory shakes me and I feel the tips of my fingers go numb.

“I see her everywhere in this damn mausoleum. How can I stay here, alone, while she is fucking that little shit of a keyboardist right in front of my bloody face?”

I rub the side of my nose, tiredly. I don’t point out your inconsistencies to you, that you had practically flaunted your girlfriend in front of Kim for an entire year before she left you, that Kim and McLagan are virtually in hiding from you and your blind rages, that we share as many memories here as you and her do. Instead, I stare stoically across the room, carefully not looking at you and betraying myself, and I say what I always say.

“Whatever you what to do, Keith.”

 You smile, but the mischievousness doesn’t quite make it to your eyes. You reach into your jacket pocket and pull out a little bag. Neatly and efficiently, you make two tidy lines of the contents on the coffee table and look up at me expectantly. I sigh and slowly, knees creaking, kneel next to you on the floor by the table.

We each do a line with a practiced ease that makes me feel weary and jaded. Head buzzing, I get up and sit back on the couch. You join me and we share the shadowy silence companionably.

I can’t look at you anymore without seeing the brazen young man you were. You were so bright and talented that I sometimes still feel blinded in the afterglow. I don’t know when I fell in love with you; one day it was just stupid fun and chumming around and then, out of the blue, it wasn’t anymore. I remember hating her with a slow burn, counting the bruises on her thin arms with a vindictive pleasure that would later shake and sicken me, leaving me gasping through convulsing dry heaves in the bathroom.

I concentrate on my heartbeat as that peculiar lightheadedness swallows me down. You are inches away from me, but it may as well be miles for as impossible it seems to touch you now. You turn your head and your pupils widen as you look at me, swallowing me. Your lips part slightly.

I lean towards you, face upturned and you place a gentle hand against my breastbone. “No, John,” you whisper kindly. “It isn’t funny when no one is watching.”

***

Like a moth to a flame, I am drawn to him after that long night, seeking him out even after I tell myself to let it drop, to go home and go to bed. But my night with you has left me feeling feverish and aching, like my skin is too small for my body. He is shut away in the little closet he calls a studio, even now at half past four in the morning, his long frame bent awkwardly to fit in among all the recording equipment and racks of guitars. I see the corner of a pillow peeking out from beneath a table strewn with scraps of writings and I am not surprised. It was I, after all, that expected to find him here this early and not in bed with his wife.

He jumps when he hears the door open, but does not glance up from what he is doing. His refusal to acknowledge me makes me disproportionately furious. I watch as he extends a shaking hand to grasp a bottle of gin, takes a drink and then sets the bottle down, unsteadily.

“Drunk already, Townshend?” I whisper, my lingering high making me reckless, certain that despite the hum of machinery in the little room, he can hear every word. “Or shall I say, still? I really don’t know why anyone wastes their time on you, you bleedin’ sod.”

He doesn’t even flinch at my words, which makes me even more angry. _If I can’t have what I want from you, I bloody well will have what I want from him_. I decide to go for broke and say what I know will get a rise from the hunched man.

“I saw him earlier today, you know. Remember the red head with the pert little arse? He is most definitely screwing her senseless by now.”

He hurls the bottle across the room and then turns to me. I have just enough time to think what a monumentally stupid idea this is before his fist crashes into my stomach. He does not have our singer’s strength, to drop a man with just one punch, but the hit is hard enough to drive the breath from my body and leave me gasping helplessly.

I relish the pain even as he drags me up to eye level, his hands twisted in my shirt collar, his clear blue eyes not quite sane. “Don’t you dare talk about him to me,” he snarls through his clenched teeth, his slender build belying a wiry strength.

“I will talk about what I damn well please,” I retort, surprised as always by the venom in my voice.

“Yeah? Do you want to talk about how he is too torn up about some faithless little wench of a girl to even notice you by his side day in and day out?”

Again he has driven the air from my body. “You wouldn’t dare,” I breathe.

His face is twisted with an inner turmoil that makes him look barely human. “I would dare anything.” He turns and rubs his hands down his shirtfront as if they were covered in dirt and then he speaks again, “Oh, that’s right, you aren’t at his side all the time, are you? Sometimes you are here, getting fucked by _me_ , pretending with all your might that he even wants to touch you.”

I lose all semblance of self control at his words and feel almost dizzy as the blood rushes to my head. I ram forward and grab his shoulders, shoving him into a soundboard in a desperate attempt to make him shut up. He is ready for me and twists violently, throwing my balance as we both crash to the floor.

I prop myself up on one elbow. He pulls himself into an awkward crouch, poised like a deer about to bolt. He has somehow managed to split his lip in the fall and I watch, dazed, as the blood trickles from his mouth. I glance down and see his arousal, lewdly outlined by his too tight trousers. A slightly darker circle of moisture spreads from where the tip of his cock strains against the fabric. Without warning, he lunges for me and grabs my shirt, half ripping it off my shoulder in his rush. I hear the tear of finely woven fabric with a wince and another surge of ire.

“Fuck, Townshend, that shirt was bloody expensive, you sod!”

“Shut up,” he says and proceeds to make me by crushing his ravaged lips to my own. I taste his blood mingled with gin on my tongue and want to gag, but he is busy pressing me to the floor with the vigor of the kiss and freeing me from the ruined remains of my shirt.

He pulls away and lowers his head to attend to my trousers and suddenly I can almost see another tousled brown head, another set of clever fingers working to free me and I moan, “Oh, God…”

He must hear the desperate yearning in my voice because he exhales forcefully through his nose and ruthlessly drives the heel of his hand into my crotch. The pain lances through my fantasy and brings me crashing back to reality. His slender chest is heaving with contained emotion and the sweat on his forehead mingles with my own as he grinds our half clad hips together with a force that sends stabs of aching pressure through my bones.

I close my eyes to try to recapture my vision, but he once again wrests me into the present with a ringing slap. I watch, glassy eyed and resigned as he struggles out of his trousers and shirt and then pulls mine off, hurriedly. A dark smattering of hair on his pale chest makes him seem at once younger and older than he is and his erection juts out, purpled and vulgar, from his narrow hips.

He shoves his hands into the crook behind my knees, slipping with heated friction in the perspiration that has gathered there. He presses my knees to my chest. My spine grinds against the floor with each degree he bends me and I think of a lithe young body bent over a drum kit, nimble hands fingering sticks into complex flourishes, mouth working furiously, hair dark with sweat.

I feel the head of his cock nudging against my entrance, my hips already starting to ache from the angle he has pushed my legs and a cold trickle of fear pools down in my gut. From the look in his eyes, he is in no mood to be gentle.

He inhales sharply and buries himself to the balls in one ferocious thrust. I scream as pain races to my brain and every muscle in my body seems to contract at once. My vision goes white.

Then he moves and I gasp, desperately trying to get air into my rebellious lungs. It feels as if he is pulling some vital organ out with his cock, my pancreas or some shit like that. My hands skitter across his shoulder and wind up in his hair as he thrusts in again. I grunt when he hits home and take a deep, shuddering breath, the tension starting to build in my groin.

He is nothing like you, I remind myself firmly and yet I can’t seem to stop those blue eyes from melting into deep black coffee, framed with sweeping, plush lashes. I can hear your voice, sex-husked and tinged with laughter, murmuring, “My dear, dear boy,” in my ear.

My reverie is broken by the sound of actual muttering. He is talking to himself, berating himself with epitaphs that only a darkly creative mind like his could think of. It frightens me to think how well I must know him that I know exactly what he needs right now. I dig my fingernails into his back and he leans against the pain, hitting my prostate with deadly accuracy on each deepening thrust.

He starts to cry, great angry sobs and I turn my head, unable to watch. His body arches, a bone breaking tension in every limb and he fucks me with a fury that seems to deny his tears. His knees scrape on the rough wooden floor, desperately seeking purchase, and I smell the bright, metallic tang of blood on the air above and through the overriding musk of sex. I don’t know if it is his or mine.

I am angry again, without warning or motive. I am angry at him for knowing so well what to do to me. I am angry at you for all the stupid hell you put me through. I am angry at myself for needing him with such perverted compulsion.

“I hate you.”

“You love me, you lying cunt.” My snarl surprises even myself.

“I hate that I love you. Oh, God…I can’t do this anymore! I don’t even know which things I tell myself are lies and which are facts.” He pushes into me with a might that rocks my hips and back off the floor and sends cramps racing through my shoulder muscles.

He comes silently but for the long, drawn out hiss of breath between his clenched teeth. I reach down and a few, well practiced jerks are all it takes before I am howling out my release with wordless abandon. He collapses on top of me and I can’t seem to tell where his post orgasmic spasms end and my own begin.

Abruptly, he pulls away and I cry out again with the pain of it. He sprawls on his side against the wall, holding his head and rocking slightly.

I lie on the floor of his recording studio and try to gather my shattered mind together. I know that this is an addiction as powerful as any drug and that we are not good together. But somehow I feel all twisted up inside, facing north when I am facing east, facing south. And I know that the next time a chocolate eyed drummer looks my way or a golden haired siren calls past him, we will end up thrown together again, all bruised hearts and fuming lust, bleeding out from all our wounds.

I pull on my clothes, swapping my torn shirt for his suit jacket, and shove my feet into my leather boots. I walk away from him, wishing you could see right through me as easily as this broken man I can’t seem to renounce.


End file.
